Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  The inscription must refer to Rosington, Dougal thought. It had been one of the great foundations of the Middle Ages, ranking in prestige with Glastonbury, Bury St Edmunds and Ely. Just the sort of place where you would expect a library with up-market manuscripts like this. And wasn’t it a Benedictine monastery, too? – and the Benedictines had surely been important in the process of importing Caroline Minuscule as a book-hand from France and establishing it in England.

  On impulse, Dougal tried the catalogue – the small one on the way out of the Paleography Room – for Rosington. His luck held – POOTERKIN, B.W., had privately published the Ph.D. thesis which he had presented to the Eric Ehrlinger Memorial University, Alabama, three years ago and had given a copy to the University of London Library: The Abbey Library of St Tumwulf’s, Rosington: a Critical Handlist of its Actual & Putative Contents in the Middle Ages, Together with a Summary of the Arguments for & against the Existence of a Scriptorium.

  He jotted down the class number on his wrist and wandered round the shelves until he found the right place. The book was there; it was a glossy production, bound in green imitation leather with gilt lettering on the spine. Dr Pooterkin evidently had a high opinion of the value of his contribution to scholarship. Dougal leafed through it and was gratified to find that the Augustine manuscript was listed. It was still in the library there, surviving the Reformation and the upgrading of Rosington to the status of a cathedral.

  The lassitude which afflicted him in libraries (it had made being a library assistant a particularly hazardous occupation) surged over him as he stood there with the book in his hand. Oh, God, he wanted to go home and collapse in an armchair with a cup of tea. And talk to Amanda. It was only three o’clock. Perhaps if he took the book out he could work at home as efficiently as here. Besides the question of provenance, which Pooterkin could settle perfectly adequately, there was only the translation to do.

  The inside cover of the book sported, for some unfathomable reason, the red Reference Only label. Dougal glanced swiftly around him. There was no one behind him and on the other three sides he was protected by shelves. With practiced ease he slipped the book into his waistband, at the back where his jacket sheltered his bottom from prying eyes. Fortunately, the book was relatively thin; the only discernible effect, he thought, was that it possibly gave him a more upright carriage than usual as it nudged against his spine.

  At the entrance to the tube station he bought a Standard. Gumper was on page three: MAFIA-STYLE MURDER OF LECTURER; it told Dougal less than Primrose knew.

  When he got back to Chiswick, Amanda was typing away with a frown on her face and a growing pile of used Tipp-Ex in the ashtray.

  Dougal made a pot of tea and settled down to translating. He had finished within an hour and wished he had arranged to meet Hanbury this evening instead of tomorrow.

  Next morning, Thursday, he dozed towards midday in the virtuous knowledge that there was no reason to get up. Amanda did: she went shopping and later brought him coffee and The Times in bed. As he leafed through the paper in the direction of the crossword, his eye caught a name he knew in the obituary column.

  HANBURY, James Edward. Suddenly on February 8 in London. Funeral private.

  Dougal felt as if a safety curtain had been lowered between him and a golden future.

  He didn’t try to find out more about Hanbury’s death. It would have been stupid to push his luck. Perhaps Hanbury’s bosses were covering their tracks. Or maybe an old grudge from Hanbury’s past had caught up with him. Instead, Dougal counted his blessings: Hanbury’s 200 pounds retainer and the comfort of knowing that he was clear of a dangerous business.

  He intended to use the money to pay off his arrears of rent. Amanda persuaded him that they deserved a night out first. It was the sort of night which ends with breakfast at the Cafe Royal. After that, there seemed little point in using the remainder for debts.

  Dougal temporarily quashed his misgivings. It was a very pleasant weekend indeed – for some reason he and Amanda were happiest when the moving parts of their relationship were oiled by money. For a while they could forget the dank seediness of London. Even the weather seemed better when you had money for taxis.

  His happiness was accentuated by the absence of Gumper and Hanbury – it was something just to be alive in a world where people died with such alarming frequency.

  Beneath this realization lurked a less comfortable consequence of the week’s events. By Sunday morning Dougal could no longer pretend to himself that it wasn’t there. He extracted Amanda’s attention from the colour supplement and tried to explain it to her.

  ‘Two murders, and I saw one of the bodies and collaborated with the killer. The funny thing was, it didn’t revolt me. And it doesn’t now.’

  ‘You were sick after finding Gumper.’ Amanda always preferred other people to be scrupulously honest with themselves.

  ‘That was just . . . a physical reaction. It didn’t upset my morals.’ The last word embarrassed Dougal: morals were safer left in the abstract. He hurried on. ‘And I didn’t mind about Hanbury, except for the money. It’s as if they didn’t matter to me.’

  ‘So? Does that make you some kind of superman? It might be useful if you wanted to be an undertaker.’

  ‘Do you think it would have had the same effect on you?’

  Amanda considered the question, her eyes straying back to the magazine on her lap. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at length; and her tone said, ‘I don’t particularly care, either.’ She put an end to the conversation by saying, ‘You’re potty,’ amiably enough, it was true, but Dougal felt slightly cheated. He told himself that they were very different people, that this was a large part of her attraction for him.

  And he thought of his father briefly, how he used to tell bedtime stories about killing Germans with his Sten gun. But that wasn’t the same, of course. That was in the war.

  Life returned to straitened normality with surprising rapidity; it was as if that Tuesday had been a hiccough in the usual rhythm, a day whose significance could safely be disregarded because it was so unlike everything else. Dougal did a little desultory work, wondering yet again why he had chosen such a strange subject. Barring an economic miracle, this would have to be his last term.

  The thought of retiring from being a student failed to worry him unduly; the research had always been on the periphery of his life, an activity to lend occupation to spare moments, a tidy answer to supply when people at parties asked him what he did.

  He asked Amanda what she felt about moving out of London altogether and ending this fiction of maintaining separate residences. She said she’d think about it.

  One evening Dougal looked through Pooterkin’s thesis and found that a good deal of space was devoted to the Augustine manuscript. Not only did it please Pooterkin aesthetically – his remarks on the elegance of the ampersands verged on the lyrical – but he used it as the keystone of his theory that a pre-Conquest scriptorium had existed at Rosington. He was convinced that the bows of the ‘g’s clearly showed the influence of a particular Continental scriptorium; he hypothesized the presence of a writing master from Cologne at Rosington in the late tenth century, and who was Dougal to disagree with him?

  Pooterkin was also delighted to be able to demonstrate that the Rosington Augustine was an unusually home-loving manuscript. Unlike the majority of British medieval manuscripts, its progress through the centuries was well charted. A twelfth-century catalogue of the Abbey library mentioned it, clinching the identification by noting the person to whom it was dedicated. Four hundred years later, Leland listed it among the library’s treasures. By that time it had acquired mildly miraculous powers and was associated anachronistically with St Tumwulf himself.

  After the Reformation the Abbey had received a new lease of life as the centre of a newly constituted see. An antiquarian Minor Canon included the manuscript in a catalogue he made of the Cathedral library in the reign of James I. And it was still there, according to Po
oterkin, on display in the Chapter House.

  Dougal toyed with the idea of a day trip to Rosington. It should be possible to examine the manuscript closely – he could easily write himself an enthusiastic testimonial on headed writing paper from the secretary’s office. But he regretfully abandoned the idea: there was no real point in going. He didn’t know what he was looking for, or even if the original manuscript was in itself in any way relevant. If someone was planning to pinch it, there was nothing he could do – or wanted to do.

  He closed Pooterkin’s book and persuaded Amanda to come down to the Crown & Anchor instead.

  On the Thursday after the weekend the police interviewed him. A notice at the Department had requested those who had been in the building on Tuesday afternoon and those who were students of Dr Gumper (an unfortunate phrase, Dougal thought) to arrange with the secretary a time to see the police. The mobile police headquarters and the paraphernalia of a murder investigation had been withdrawn from the college by now, but a room had been set aside for police use. Dougal qualified for interview on both counts and thought he might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.

  In the event, it didn’t take long. A bored, plainclothes sergeant sat behind the desk, with a constable on his right taking notes. Within three minutes it had been established that Dougal knew nothing of any use to them. The sergeant, however, was mechanically affable:

  ‘Well, that’s all most useful. Helps us eliminate some points in the afternoon and corroborates what we already know.’ Dougal watched the constable with fascination: he had found an unexpectedly satisfying treasure trove picking his nose, and was rolling it to and fro between the index finger and thumb of his left hand.

  ‘Now. Just one thing more, Mr . . . um Dougal. You last saw the late Dr Gumper the Thursday before he died. Did he seem at all odd then? Anything unusual? What sort of mood was he in?’

  They must be baffled to be asking such vague questions as these. He wondered momentarily whether to introduce an appetizing red herring, as much for their sakes as his, but decided to stick to the truth. The constable carefully deposited his bogey under the seat of his chair.

  ‘He was normal.’ It sounded unhelpful, so he expanded it. ‘He was a little flushed, I think – looked as though he’d had a good lunch. But that was fairly common.’ He had also been pompous and had tried to bully Dougal into producing some work – the Augustine transcription, ironically enough. That too had been normal.

  The sergeant thanked him and asked him to send the next one in. Dougal felt oddly disgusted with the police. The last vestige of his childhood belief in their infallibility had vanished. There was no rational basis for this, he knew: merely an infantile disappointment at the absence of a hawk-faced officer who by intuition and deduction should have known precisely what he, Dougal, had left out. Which would have been extraordinarily inconvenient.

  He walked up the corridor before going home – he hadn’t checked his pigeonhole for a few days and had forgotten, earlier this afternoon, to find out if a substitute for Gumper had been arranged.

  There was no notice, but there were several things for him in the pigeonhole he shared with the rest of the Ds. The society circulars went straight in the wastepaper bin which the authorities had thoughtfully placed nearby, together with an invitation to become a Friend of the College in return for arranging an annual payment by banker’s order. As an afterthought he threw in the envelope as well, since it was marked PLEASE REUSE. Lastly, there was a note from the secretary: would he please collect a package which had arrived for him by registered post.

  Dougal found this puzzling. Had he ordered a photostat of something? But in that case, why registered post? He went to the office. The secretary, a large, rabbit-faced woman in her mid-thirties, who radiated surly inefficiency, broke off a description of her boyfriend which she was transmitting telephonically to an unknown destination and gave Dougal a large envelope. It was buff-coloured and bulky, firmly secured with Sellotape and string. Dougal thanked her, to which she replied with a sniff; he correctly interpreted this as a reproof, in a language which transcended mere words, such as ‘We’re not running a post office here.’

  He left the room, exchanging a brief conspiratorial smile with the West Indian typist with a pert bottom, who had to suffer Miss Adlard’s moods on a nine-to-five basis.

  In the privacy of the passage, he examined the envelope. His name and the address of the college were written in a firm, rather elegant hand. He turned the envelope over, and was about to tear it open when he saw there was a sender’s address on the back.

  James Hanbury,

  c/o Messrs Coutts & Co.,

  10 Mount St,

  London W.1.

  5

  The house where Dougal lived was in a turning off Finchley Road. Its front door was set in an archway which was chiefly Perpendicular in inspiration, though there was more than a trace of the glory that was Greece in the pillars which supported the porch. The hall was gloomy now, but refreshingly cool and dark in summer. Its flagstones were laid out in a black and white chequerboard which reminded Dougal of Venetian palazzi and chamber music. Today, for some reason, he found himself thinking of that Emperor of China who laid out a courtyard as a chess board and played with condemned men, suitably attired, as the pieces, their deaths delayed or hastened according to the skills and strategies of the players. And would it have been better to have been a king or a pawn? Or even the Emperor on his balcony?

  Dougal took the stairs two at a time, his eyes gradually adjusting to the dim light which filtered through the stained glass windows at the half-landings.

  Dougal lived in the attic, on the third floor. Originally the space had housed a gigantic billiard table and nothing else; now it supplied him with a sitting room, a bedroom and a minute kitchen. Over all three rooms ran a long skylight which projected like a small aerial greenhouse over the flat roof of the house.

  He found Amanda in the sitting room. She was playing patience – a complicated two-pack version – on the rug in front of the electric fire. She didn’t look up, but when he touched her shoulder said, ‘Hullo, William,’ to the twelve columns and eight depots of cards on the floor. ‘Shan’t be a moment.’

  ‘Red nine on black ten?’ said Dougal. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  ‘It won’t help. All my kings have gone. There isn’t any.’

  ‘I bought some.’

  Dougal squeezed into the kitchen, filled the kettle and switched it on. While he was waiting for it to boil, he decanted the tea he had bought into the caddy, washed a pair of mugs and found the tray under the rubbish bin. There was a curious smell there again, he noticed, and wondered what exotic growths were thriving in its plastic lined interior this time. The kettle boiled, relieving him of the moral obligation to search for the source of the smell. He filled the teapot, put it on the tray and took it into the sitting room.

  Amanda was scraping the cards together. ‘The skylight’s leaking again,’ she said conversationally. ‘How were the police?’

  ‘Dull. One was bored and the other picked his nose the whole time. Routine stuff.’ He put the tray on the octagonal table between the two armchairs. Suddenly he couldn’t preserve his facade of nonchalance any more. ‘Look, I had a letter today. From Hanbury. At least I suppose it’s a letter. I haven’t opened it yet.’

  Amanda looked at him incredulously. She wore the expression which always made Dougal feel about five and on the verge of committing some hideous misdemeanour such as putting his knife in his mouth.

  ‘You mean you didn’t open it?’

  ‘No. It seemed better to wait. I mean, God knows what’s in it. Why don’t you pour the tea while I open it?’

  Dougal took out his penknife, cut the string and slit open the flap of the envelope. Inside were two smaller envelopes, one containing a letter, the other a bundle of bank notes fastened with a rubber band. He looked across at Amanda who laughed and said, ‘Read the letter out.’

 
; Dougal unfolded it. It was long: six or seven sheets of hotel writing paper covered with that flamboyant script.

  My Dear William,

  I hope you will never read this letter. I shall send it to my bank with instructions to forward it, if I haven’t told them not to within a week. It’s a sort of insurance policy, I suppose.

  You will be wondering what all this is about. When we had a drink together earlier this evening I knew that certain people were wanting to kill me; now I think it likely they will try much sooner than I had anticipated. I’m afraid this must sound a trifle melodramatic. I am writing to you because I like you – perhaps I see something of my younger self in you; also there’s no one else to write to. In any case, I owe you some money.

  I misled you intentionally tonight on a number of points. Gumper was working for me. I used to know him, very slightly, at Oxford. He accepted the commission and then tried to blackmail me. He knew money was involved somewhere, and wanted a share. He believed his leverage was increased by the fact he knew something of a youthful peccadillo of mine.

  Enough of him. For you to understand the events which led up to this, you must allow me to outline a short story. You may have seen the obituary of Canon Oswyth Vernon-Jones in the press last month. His work among the criminal classes attracted a good deal of attention in the fifties – you’re probably too young to remember the shock which his controversial reassessment of the Crucifixion, My God Among Thieves, caused at the time. He was once a chaplain at Dartmoor, and was then intimately concerned with several rehabilitation centres before he became a Canon of Rosington.

  So far as I know, only one other person besides myself knew of the Canon’s other profession. While at Dartmoor – with my help, I might add – he developed a sideline to supplement his income: he became a fixer in a very discreet, superior way. He always operated through intermediaries.

  At first his concern was to supply a few home comforts to selected prisoners; he probably saw it as an extension of the command to love thy neighbour. But he soon grew involved in the activity – not only financially, but intellectually as well. He was ideally placed for it, of course – it’s incredible how easily a clergyman may move in all ranks of society (particularly if he has a legitimate pastoral interest in criminals). His organization soon extended beyond the confines of Dartmoor; when he left his chaplaincy there, he travelled widely and extended it still further (with my help, of course). He was, in the Johnsonian phrase, a clubbable man, at least externally; he could make himself equally agreeable to an archbishop or a child murderer. And frequently did.